ONE sunny morning last week a 55-year-old advertising executive and father was walking to work on Sydney's North Shore when he came across a toddler wandering by himself just 10m from busy Military Rd (in North Sydney), no guardian in sight.

"Where's your mummy," he asked the small boy, who didn't respond and kept walking towards the dangerous thoroughfare.

Against his instinct, the man did not pick up the boy, for fear of being accused of being a paedophile abductor.

Instead, as the child kept moving towards danger, he called to a lady in a nearby shop to ask if the boy was hers. She ran outside and chased the toddler down.

In the commotion the mother emerged from a nearby shop, apparently unperturbed.

But the man was angry.

"What would have got her upset is if I had picked the boy up when I saw him, which was my first instinct," he said.

"If the child had walked on to Military Rd and been killed I would have had to wear the guilt for life. Men have been reduced to [failing to react] when they see a child in danger for fear of being labelled paedophiles."

In 100 different ways every day the same scenario is played out, reflecting a profound and largely unspoken shift in the way decent men view small children.

These are just ordinary men, fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, who have been made to feel like criminals around children and obliged to suppress their natural, healthy instinct to protect the most vulnerable members of our society.

In the same way, you can understand why men using the change rooms at a public swimming pool in a northern Sydney suburb last week might be concerned about the presence of unsupervised young boys undressing nearby.

Afraid of being falsely accused of being paedophiles, several men complained to pool management that they felt uncomfortable undressing in front of the schoolboys, in an increasingly febrile atmosphere in which even the mildest accusation of sexual impropriety can be ruinous

So the boys were banned from the change rooms of the Hornsby Aquatic Centre and reportedly had to ride back on the bus to school in wet swimsuits.

Nobody comes out of the story feeling better about themselves, but who can blame the men for wanting to protect themselves from complaints?

It has happened before.

One of the many heartfelt comments from men responding to the story on The Daily Telegraph website last week detailed the experience of "RM" when he took his four-year-old niece and two-year-old nephew to a playground and saw a little girl hurt herself.

"I was asking if she was OK, which one is her mum etc, only to have a woman (who turned out to be the child's mother) rush up and yell, 'what are you doing?' Thankfully another mother there came to my defence."

RM was critical of the mother who had left her child unsupervised while she went across the road for a coffee.

In the UK , a notorious case a few years ago highlighted the dilemma men are finding themselves in when a truck driver saw a two-year-old girl wandering alone along a village road but decided against stopping to see if she was OK for fear of being accused of bad intentions.

The child drowned in a pond and the poor man has to live with the crushing guilt.

Much of this modern paranoia is due to revelations of child sexual abuse over the past decade - and increased knowledge of the predatory activities of sneaky paedophiles such as "Dolly" Dunn - making Australian parents hyper vigilant.

I remember as a reporter covering the shocking paedophilia revelations of the Wood royal commission more than a decade ago, feeling suddenly over-protective towards my toddler son in the supermarket, wondering if there were lascivious intent behind the innocent smile of a male shopper. The natural interest and regard between older and younger males became verboten.

Mothers began to worry about allowing their small boys to go alone into shopping centre urinals, and the sight of anxious women loitering around male toilets, eyes glued on the door, became disconcertingly commonplace, as did the phenomenon of women bringing sons as old as eight or nine into female bathrooms.

It was a sad but understandable shift in attitudes towards men. Now they were all suspect.

We have seen the consequences for families in the tragic story this year of a mother jailed in Amsterdam for kidnapping her young son and spiriting him out of Australia because of her apparently mistaken belief that her husband had paedophile tendencies. Once the seed of doubt is planted there's no telling how far it can go.

Previously there was a widespread societal denial that such foul behaviour was even possible and certainly not from seemingly avuncular types such as Dolly Dunn, a kindly faced teacher who took a special interest in the problems of his young charges.

But this sort of squeamishness about acknowledging paedophilia had conspired to allow past cover-ups and deny victims natural justice. In some cases, even mothers of victims refused to believe such wickedness was possible, thus compounding the crime with their tacit approval.

It was a deliberate decision by clear-eyed judges and prosecutors such as Margaret Cunneen SC, who prosecuted Dunn, to make explicit the true nature of paedophilia.

Earlier this month, in sentencing the unspeakably vile paedophile David Shane Whitby to 26 years in jail for the rape and ongoing sexual abuse of eight children as young as 14 months, NSW District Court Judge Peter Berman declared that, distressing as they were, the offences should be detailed explicitly and publicly as a warning .

"I've never seen a human being treat another in such a vile manner ... there are people like Mr Whitby in the world and it is necessary to describe the evil that people do because as Shakespeare reminds us, 'that evil lives after them'," he said.

The pendulum needed to swing in the direction of disclosure in order to strip paedophiles of the cover of our ignorance.

But demonising men won't prevent child abuse. In the interests of children, we women must force ourselves to reclaim the notion of male innocence.

The male protective instinct, after all, is one of the most crucial safeguards of childhood.

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Comments on this story

Paul of Sydney Posted at 5:07 PM October 28, 2010

I can't understand what's wrong when a person (male or female) looks, checks on or plays with a child. I mean unless harm is being done, I don't care if the person is a secret pedophile or anything; again, until some real sexually explicit action is done against the child, like rubbing, touching, playing with parts, etc.
Lots of men look indecently at women, and vice versa. You can't protect a child from 'looks' and those who want to see some stuff can always turn to the Internet.
I always help a child in need but I'm surprised that my actions will be treated in a single minded way regardless of my intent and actual impact on the child.
It's kinda stupid I guess.

Tim of Hobart Posted at 4:55 PM October 28, 2010

For all those here who report finding kids in distress and feeling powerles to help try this: next time you find one (hopefully never!) DO pick the little one up and then start calling out "Mummy" at the top of your voice. When the parent turns up, should it be like the 'ducked-out-for-coffee-while-my-kid's-at-the-park-mum', seriously blast them for their incompetence as a bad parent. Force the shame back onto they as deserve it and away from someone who is just concerned for the welfare of the little one.

Bring Back The Real Men of Perth Posted at 4:55 PM October 28, 2010

Somehow this debate has turned into a battle of the sexes which is a shame because the two topics are not related. Sadly, real men are declining in our society and are being replaced by lilly livered scardey cats who are too weak in character to take action to help another in case they are falsley accused. A real man will always step in to help another human in trouble regardless of whether its a little kid, man ,woman or child. Real men know themselves and only care what their friends and family think of them, and if friends and family are true blue, they will know their real man enough to stick by them. In the terrifying event that my little boy went missing, I would give anything to have him back and would not care who helped him or why. I would care however if I found out that grown adults let him come to harm because they were too concerned with protecting their own reputations. We need to take a few steps back and calm down. Deep down most of us are still decent human beings and its a shame that the weaker ones are denying their decency.

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